Archive for
April, 2012

All the police houses were sold off years ago, police stations have been sold off for many years, this has speeded up over the last two as more and more police stations close. Police duties are being sold off to G4S.

Successful buyers will need to remove the boxes from their current positions around the city, or get council permission to leave them there, but if they do, they must be painted a different colour to the standard police blue.

I expect there will be a¬†clamor¬†from Dr Who fans around the world (although I think they are a different size and shape to the old English police boxes.

Our march in London on 10th May will send a very powerful message to Government; as police officers we are outraged at the way we are being treated and we have real concerns about the negative impact the cuts will have on public safety.

Every police officer who is available to come to London and join the march should attend to demonstrate our anger and concern about the future of the best police service in the world. The reality of the Government imposed 20% cut to the police budget is starting to bite with the frontline beginning to suffer as a result; we have already lost over 5,200 police officer colleagues and we are under great strain as core policing services and units are either being privatised or cut completely.

We currently have a very demoralised police service; despite being absolutely committed to providing the best service that we can, we are struggling to cope as the cuts go deeper and deeper. We have already made a fundamental contribution to help tackle the national debt. We have a two-year pay freeze, we have seen our pension contributions increase and a total of ¬£300 million has been removed from police pay, yet we are being singled out and treated very unfairly by this Government.

As police officers, we do not have industrial rights, we cannot go on strike and we feel we have become a target by a Government determined to drive through ideological and detrimental reforms to the police service that will result in a poorer service for the public.

On 10th May our voice will be heard loud and clear. I look forward to seeing you on the march.

You come in as controller and within 20 minuets of sitting down you’ve picked up 10 new jobs. But the officers starting the same shift have almost to a man, and woman, booked unavailable because they’re either trying to catch up on stuff they did the day before, or have been tasked with stuff which actually is no more important than all the new victims calling in, but because the results appear on the¬†divisional¬†chief inspector’s tick chart, take presidence ¬†over everything else.

Because you can’t assign any jobs for an hour or often much more, you know the rest of the shift is just going to be one big stress-fest and by the end of the shift you’re gonna have a whole heap of shite to hand over to the next shift who will just think you’ve spent the whole day sitting on your arse doing f-all.

I never used to get stressed at work, I was¬†generally¬†considered as completely laid back, but these days I’m finding that less and less the case.

The way we work is we have one person who is the controller, whose responsibility it is to filter all the jobs, be responsible for what gets done and in what order, who decides who is and who isn’t going to be seen, and why, and decides which officers will do what jobs. The other person is a kind of assistant, they generally do the updating of the logs, field and make the phones calls from officers and to members of the public.

So when it is busy, they are usually somewhat less stressed than the controller, as they don’t have the same level of responsibility.

When you have a really busy day, it’s kind of a standing joke that you hope the ‘assistant’ has a really busy day the next day, when they’re in the big chair, just so you can kind of get your own back.

So when I came in after a particularly horrendous shift the day before, I was all but hoping for another manic shift, just so I could take the piss out of my colleague.

It didn’t happen, I was gutted. Whereas the day before, I had an average of around 40 open incidents (there’s now way on God’s earth you can keep tabs on 40 jobs, so you spend all day just reading and re-reading them trying to remember which are important, what happened when and where, and what needs doing next. It’s just bloody impossible, which is why mistakes wdo and will continue to happen, but nobody gives a shit.) The following day my mate had a maximum of about 10 jobs open at any one time, complete bloody luxury.

There is no rhyme or reason as to why two shifts a day apart can be so different. One the quieter shifts you can take the jobs as they come, stress-free, you even get time for a bit of uplifting banter which makes the job more pleasant (though you have to be careful, walls have ears), on the other days, you walk out with your head spinning, feel completely drained, stressed to the eyeballs not having had a single decent or fun moment at work. It can;t be good for productivity, health, or the public.

I haven’t made a ‘Scum of the Week Award for a little time so I’m happy to add the following piece of ¬†shite to the Hall of Fame.

Step forward the brave thug who considers it acceptable to sneak upon a frail 81-year-old man, batter him over the back of the head so that he falls to the ground, and then proceeds to rob him.

Alf McManus popped into a local shop with ¬£10 when he was attacked. He suffered broken ribs, a cut eye and bruising during the violent assault after his assailant rifled Alf’s bag as he lay on the ground. When the thug found nothing of value he demanded money. His victim claimed he had none whereupon he was kicked and stamped on before his pockets were rifled and a ¬£10 note was found, and stolen.

The incident happened this week in Prestwich near Manchester. Mr McManus was hospitalised and is so traumatised that he cannot remember anything about the offender.

It’s not often you get a Q shift in the control room (you’re not allowed to say ‘quiet’). So sometimes a quiet shift or two is really welcome.

The trouble comes when you have a quiet night shift. At least with a decent workload you are less prone to fall asleep. And you have to remember that if it’s a busy shift then some poor sod somewhere, or maybe even lots of poor sods, are probably having something of a bad day.

Ideally, nothing would happen which would be great for members of the public, but bloody¬†awful¬†for us sitting on our arses in the control room trying to while away 8-10 hours.

We had a really quiet set of shifts last week. We even went one night without a single ‘immediate’ incident, that was probably the night we only had 3 or 4 jobs all night spread across 1/5th of the entire force area.

It’s trying to kill the time. We do have access to the internet, we can bring in books, magazines or iPads, but when you are really tired, you just can’t bring yourself to do any activity which involves the brain. I’m lucky in as much as I use a remote headset, so I can stand up and walk around my desk, which is quite interesting, for 10 seconds. You can do minimal exercises standing behind the chair. Lots of people in the control room don’t like the remote headsets and are therefore tied to the desk by a bit of curly wire.

I shouldn’t really complain about Q shifts, I mean, it’s not as if we get them that often, at least we’re not getting wound up by the high level of not-jobs we have to deal with on most normal shifts. But if it takes a little bit longer to answer the radio, just remember to shout up a bit.

A lesbian PCSO has been jailed for illegally¬†accessing¬†police¬†computers¬†and passing on information to Wrexham’s ‘close-knit community’.

Lisa Stapely was apparently recruited under a positive discrimination scheme because she was a lesbian. She tipped off a friend that the police were looking for her and has been jailed for 10 months for misconduct in a public office.

It would be wrong to blame the positive discrimination policy for hiring someone who turned out to be corrupt as there must be officers and PCSOs who aren’t members of a minority sexuality group who get into trouble. But I bet the selection pool would have been greater had the requirements for the job not been based on being a lesbian.

If discrimination is wrong, so is positive discrimination. I want the best people on the streets, not ones who tick a special treatment box.

Or should that be f***ing idiots who post stuff on their Facebook page and leave themselves open to people complaining to their employers about their comments?

PC David Crawford from Merseyside Police might be wondering himself, after slagging off women who go to Ladies’ Day at Aintree. His Facebook page has now been removed as he undergoes an investigation by Merseyside’s finest rubber-heelers.

Personally, I think everyone who goes to Aintree and takes part in the furtherance of an industry where the death of horses is just an inconvenient by-product of the entertainment, should be slagged off.

Remember as one of Her Majesty’s finest, you have no rights to thoughts which are not politically correct, much less any to share those thoughts and jokes among your mates.

The biggest mistake PC Crawford seems to have made was to open his FB page to people liable to stab him in the back.

I often blog about the appalling service we give to members of the public. About how we consistently let down decent folk who ask for a simple but efficient service and only call us when they really require some police help, unlike the majority of our ‘service users’ who call us because they can’t be bothered to sort out their own lives and believe they have an entitlement for action as soon as someone looks at them funny.

News today of a corner shop in Wales who reported a local thief who ran off with two¬†packets¬†of cigarettes. They called within 15 minutes and were told police were too busy, (probably dealing with Facebook complaints, or harassing people who don’t really want to see police). The shopkeeper was told police would attend the following day.

They didn’t.

Actually, I’m suprised they said they would attend; in our force, unless the shopkeeper knows the thief personally, has a copy of his driving licence and birth certificate or a confession signed in triplicate, we don’t attend at all. We just take a report over the phone, largely so we can leave officers free to deal with the work-shy.

Anyway, the police in Cardiff didn’t attend the next day, or the day after that.

In an effort to track down the theif the shopkeeper put up a CCTV image of the thief inside the shop so staff would be alerted and customers might recognise him.

Cardiff Police eventually sent a PCSO, six days later, who told the shopkeeper to remove the photo because members of the public could see it.

Presumably, Cardiff Police are now checking asking al police forces to remove similar images from their websites and liaising with the producers of Crimewatch so they remove the relevant mugshot sections of their episodes.

After posting only yesterday about an American cop killed in the line of duty, another incident today where a police chief and 4 detectives have been shot by a gunman in New Hampshire.

Greenland Police Chief Michael Maloney was killed as police tried to serve a search warrant in the town. Four detectives from other departments were shot. The killer, Cullen Mutrie was later found dead in the apartment with the dead body of his girlfriend.

Chief Maloney was head of a very small police department. The 48-year-old was due to retire in two weeks time. Police killings are tragic full stop but how much more that he had almost done his time and was due to hang up his badge and gun in less than 14 days.

I frequently check the police news across the pond, over the years I have made many friends in the job in America. Years ago I had a visit from a deputy-sheriff in America, his wife and he stayed with my family for a few days. He happened to be responsible for firearms training within his department.

We kept in contact when he returned back home until he stopped responding to my letters. After some time I had a letter from his wife with the very sad news that he had been shot in the stomach whilst at work, although this was not fatal, it had affected him so deeply that his life had changed, the letter was very sad and bleak, depression was mentioned along with a subsequent break-up of the marriage. I never heard from him again.

I saw this week that another officer was shot and killed last week, this one, 40-year-old Austin, Texas Officer, Jaime Padron, was shot and killed after attending a disturbance at a Walmart in the early hours of the morning. His memorial service was Wednesday. Over 1,000 officers are expected to attend his funeral later in the week.

Jaime is the 27th officer to have lost his life in the line of duty. The total so far this year is 28.

A great little story in the Telegraph today about a blind lady who was devasted to find out that the start of the novel she had been writing did not come out after the pens she was using ran out of ink.

Her son arrived to read back the work she had written only to find that 26 pages were completely blank. After contacting the local police in Dorset, the Fingerprint department agreed to see if they cold¬†retrieve¬†the words that had been written using forensic handwriting analysis. One of ¬†Dorset’s finest spent her lunch hours deciphering the indents on the pages until all 26 pages of the story had been recovered.

This is something which you won’t find in any graphs and won’t appear in any statistics.